Mary Queen of Scots (2014)
“While Lord James, whom Mary considered to be her natural protector, was away on the borders dispensing justice, there was a sudden alarm that Châtelherault’s eldest son, the eccentric earl of Arran, intended to abduct the queen. Although the court sprang to the alarm, it subsequently turned out that rumours of the plot had originated in a chance remark of Arran’s; in fact that the only true stability that the nervous and highly-strung man showed in his wavering career was in his neurotic fixati...on on his cousin Mary. The next crisis had more substance to it. A mutual hatred existed between James Hepburn, earl of Bothwell, and the Hamiltons, and Bothwell decided to win the favours of an Edinburgh girl Alison Craik (‘a good handsome wench’ said Randolph)1 in order to practise a crude revenge on Arran ‘whose whore the said Alison was suspected to have been’. Bothwell, Mary’s half-brother Lord John Stewart and her Uncle René of Elboeuf (who lingered on in Scotland after the departure of her other Guise relations) gained entry to the house of Alison’s step-father, an Edinburgh merchant, on the first night wearing masks; the second night, they were denied admittance, either because Alison did not choose to betray Arran with his political enemies or because she simply did not care to repeat the experience.MoreLess
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